Reporting from the Ground
A review by Mary Cisper
Susan Tichy, “The Avalanche Path in Summer”
Ahsahta Press
113 pages, softcover, $18.00
The question is not
Does being have meaning,
But does meaning have being.
What is happening?
All day I walk over ridges
And beside cascades and pools
Deep into the Spring hills.—Kenneth Rexroth, from “Hapax”
Given rockfall, wildfire, avalanche, a mountain is not at rest. Add the human magnet pulled to circle, climb, falter, descend. If orogeny—crustal collision, folding, and deformation—births the high places, it’s not only a metaphor, it’s ridgeline, “a well-drawn fact,” “One teaspoon of snow unmelted /On the shadow side of a rock.” Like a mountain by way of its forms, its original process, Susan Tichy’s “The Avalanche Path in Summer” drew me to consider place, earth-boundedness, poetics, my own experiences above treeline. [Chased off summit by hail. Fogged glasses. Bull elk stands in a clearing—]
With movement, the terrain shifts: the poem may unscroll a route where “at every switchback, the view changes.” A path is permission, and order (temporary); pathless heads cross-country. What these poems know of walking in mountains is the body (“like all conspirators / Untrustworthy”), and consciousness, often scrambling through underbrush.
Interlacing fact, feeling, and borrowed language from many sources, including mountaineering authors, classic Chinese poets, and John Ruskin (of “Modern Painters IV: On Mountain Beauty”), Tichy’s poems invoke ongoingness, hazard distraction, stare into distances. The source is often not named, lending a sense of accretion, resonant of jumbled terrain. The sources might be called lineage or ancestral. [Open my vintage Sherman Lee’s “A History of Far Eastern Art” to the reproduction of two ink-on-silk paintings titled “Travelers on a Mountain Path.” Yes, they are in conversation with each other.] Mountain walking as ritual invites an inner unfolding, sometimes by way of self-questioning: “And pain—faint in the body’s ranges— /is it absence or presence? Near or far?” The strands unwind: is the route a question? a syntax? [Sometimes attributed to Augustine: solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking.”] Inner ongoingness couples with the unfolding path to recapitulate strata and fragment:
curve of a snow-chute,
match-stick pine trunks
fallen or flung :
‘the most magnificent piece of ruin
I have yet seen’
or beds of limestone bent like a rainbow
(‘a fine accomplice to metaphysics’)
(‘erodes according to first flaws’)—from “Another Haunting, the Pencil Line”
If walking is a form of mapping, the walker, guided by contingency, assembles, deconstructs, revises. “Feel free to wander within the poem,” the speaker suggests, “Separate perceptions into points of view.” Rupture, the slippage of experience? meaning, the experience of slippage? If orogeny doesn’t swallow you, its companions—“The ten thousand things”—prod nomenclature into catalogue. Seven lines in “‘A Tree at its Birthplace, a Boulder at its Resting Place’” unfurl names of snow-fed wildflowers. Like a walk, a poem builds rhythm, a form of presence, wave-like:
on the willow-wave
wind —driven flies
on the snow, the snowcalicoed
by rock-dust, algae, redas a kestrel’s tail
—from “At a Rockslide Ending in Willow a Larkspur Taller than Willow”
Inside rhythm dwells embodiment: the somatic of avalanche in “trees, dwarfed, splayed—” [Step into thigh-high river, cobbles underfoot.] On first picking up Gary Snyder’s “Myths & Texts,” Susan Tichy writes in Poetry Daily: “It didn’t matter that I had neither logged nor hunted, nor that my future in wildfire country was at that moment undreamt of; what I recognized was the rhythmic movement of attention from body to mind, image to abstraction, the human and the wild.” Peter Lamarque has described form as ‘the-mode-of-realisation-of-the-subject-in-the-poem.’ Tichy often uses couplets, whose footfall evokes pace, momentum, porosity:
(flowers chest-high
boots ash-covered)‘Before us lie
the wild targets’wrote Du Fu
wrotestone-skin-broken
startle-heart—from “Of Half the Views I Have Yet Said Nothing”
The path. The translation. Conversation with teachers. Inclusion of process. The opening poem tells us “you may darken the way with a pencil”. If walking is cartography, who or what is inscribed? In the collection’s closing poem, the reader learns prisoner-of-war W. H. Murray traded cigarettes “For a stump of very bad pencil” to resume work on “Mountaineering in Scotland” (“Confiscated by German Guards”). Marks on paper recall the body tracing a unique path on the ground, even if “a literature of paradise” is built on a route “‘Cluttered with incoherent snow.’”
The avalanche path : freighted : gravitational : opening. Although a poem isn’t a mountain walk, changing views, gestures, and reflections may slip through it—presence sluice, catastrophe witness, philosophy school—in which the way is clear, the way is lost, “and ‘the Way’s been in ruins a thousand years’”—a twice-repeated quote, a wisdom fragment, a resting place (temporary). Forces of accretion, broken talus, the field of pain, Murray’s confiscated manuscript. Literally or figuratively, life clings to precipices: “This form of silence called ellipsis of battle.” Martial images, and the color red, darken this book’s canvas: “A painter whose brush technique was called / ‘The capture of a fort in war.” A mountain isn’t an answer. It’s an echo.
“The Avalanche Path in Summer” crisscrosses vast poetic and philosophical ground in ways that could be called alluvial: collecting, braiding, repeating, as in this excerpt from “Lines Called Map are Different from Lines Called Song”:
I found a songbird’s nest in the mouth of a cannon
I FOUND A SONGBIRD’S NEST IN THE MOUTH OF A CANNON
Method of transport over the mountains
METHOD OF TRANSPORT OVER THE MOUNTAINS
Place barrel of the cannon into a hollowed tree
PLACE BARREL OF THE CANNON INTO A HOLLOWED TREE
A map is not a song. A walk repeated is not the same walk. Repetition, a form of litany? interrogation? A song is not a map, a song is relation between dead trees and “a worn-out doe, her twins / won’t make it, either” without endpoint; “and one wrong road is as good / as any other” for conversing with guides like Ruskin negotiating light and dark: “For ‘the touch of a pen / lends great transparency to shadows.’”
Mind into matter, and vice versa. An aesthetic of. Which leads to what could be called the gestural essence of these poems—movement of body and mind, traversing, halting, studying the evidence—as in the opening lines from “The Mountains Flew over the Water as Birds”:
Wander out in the morning with a cup in my hand
A lion scat and three bloody tracks in the driveway
This form of silence called ellipsis of battle
And on horsemint salient: a small trouble of wet socks
Mind traces a muddy spiral on a gallery floor (first typed galaxy). Ruskin reminds us that visual art is performance art; and a poet’s awareness follows her footsteps: “No thoughts, counting seven paces.” In a sense, the book, ordered into five sections, feels like one long poem in which companions speak—brokenly, precisely, intimately—in conversations with isness, ‘reality,’ process:
A close-up painting of warriors on blood-stained heather
(butterflies apparently licking salt)
‘Or have I quietly assumed that we saw everything?’—from “Rockfall on a Cliff Hidden by Trees”
Not to quarrel with what is, to converse with one’s understanding of it. Embodiment, ground-truthed. (Reading Tichy reminded me of another mountain-inspired poet, Kenneth Rexroth.) Thank painters, mountaineers, and poets for the persistent desire to inscribe movement through the craggy space of mind. Where switchbacks are a form of circling the disaster, the effulgence. What is a poetics of orogeny? What is this escarpment tether? Of necessity, one is always starting out: “Assent in words / That nothing can be expressed in words”. [Ask, ask again. Does each iteration move closer to the end? Count a dozen drafts of this review before calling it unfinished.] So maybe a reason to lace one’s boots—
A practical backpacker carefully considers each item before it’s packed. Is it useful? is it guidance? A gram-conscious reader brings (at 87 g) “The Pocket Emily Dickinson” for “A Quartz contentment, like a stone —” “The Avalanche Path in Summer” (190 g): “ ‘Look for masters / find paths’ // says Wang Wei /—or did I write that // in the trail guide?” Is it solved? is it not solved? Yes, and yes.
Mary Cisper is the author of “Dark Tussock Moth” (Trio House Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Interim, Mid-American Review, Newfound, and elsewhere.